Badran, Ramzi, “Intrastate peace agreements and the durability of peace,” Conflict Management and Peace Science, Vol. On the long road to the outcome of Hampson`s peace accords, Stedman (1997) examines in his pioneering paper one of the main causes of the failure of peace agreements to end civil wars. He argues that the cheerleaders – leaders and parties who believe that peace resulting from the negotiations has threatened their power, their worldview and their interests and have used force to undermine attempts to achieve such peace (Stedman 1997:5) – are the greatest threat to the successful implementation of a peace agreement. It identifies three main spoiler genes: limited, greedy and total. Limited spoilers have tight goals. In the case of greedy spoilers, they are driven by agendas of opportunism that develop and diminish with the dynamics of conflict. As for the total popils, they want nothing less than the acquisition of power. Unlike all other warring factions, the priority objective of the Taylor-led NPFL was to make Charles Taylor the new president of Liberia (Kieh 2009). For example, in one of his meetings with the Interfaith Mediation Committee, the conflict resolution mechanism of Liberia`s religious leaders, an ad hoc amalgam of Christian and Islamic clerics, founded during the first Liberian civil war, Taylor insisted on “the immediate resignation of Mr. Doe and his regime and the transfer of power to the National Patriotic Front of Liberia” (Francis 1990:2).
Taylor: “It was just a matter of hours for him to take Monrovia and overthrow Mr. Doe… peace talks” (Francis 1990:2). The first Liberian civil war was the result of the contradictions and multidimensional crises of underdevelopment – cultural, economic, political, security and social – triggered by the Liberian state (Kieh, 2008; Kieh 2011). These crises appeared in the two phases of the development of the Liberian state – the time of the colonists (1820-1926) and the neocolonial era (1926-present) (Kieh 2008; Kieh 2011). The colonial phase of state-building was characterized by the primacy of ethnocultural characteristics. It is interesting to note that these differences have softened with class differences (Burrowes 1982). In other words, the origins of the ancestors and the pigmentation of the skin of the different groups intersected with their respective class positions in the local political economy. Thus, during the colonial period, light-skinned African-American returnees occupied the middle layer of the insert class structure (Burrowes 1982; Kieh 2008) and the upper level during the Commonwealth period and the first four decades of the independence period (Kieh 2008). During the neocolonial phase of state construction, the pivot was the rise of the class as a defining feature of the state and its local political economy (Kieh 2008). Kieh 2011).
Another famous example would be the series of peace agreements known as the peace of Westphalia. It has initiated modern diplomacy that integrates the modern system of nation-states. Subsequent wars were no longer about religion, but about state issues. This encouraged the Catholic and Protestant powers to ally themselves, which led to a series of important realignments. Caplan, Richard and Hoeffler, Anke, “Why peace endures: An analysis of post-conflict stabilization,” European journal of international security, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2017): 133-152. What can international actors do to prevent this war from happening again if opponents of the civil war sign a peace agreement? It`s a matter of life and death for millions of people. The two worst explosions of mass violence of the 1990s – Angola in 1993 and Rwanda in 1994 – followed the failure of the peace agreement to end these wars. In both cases, death and destruction were shocking: an estimated 350,000 people died in Angola and 800,000 died in Rwanda.